About Me

I was a reporter and columnist for 40 years for a chain of newspapers in the suburbs of Chicago. I'm a military veteran having served in the United States Army Combat Engineers (Cpl. E-4) and a Korean War veteran with an Honorable Discharge from the Armed Forces of the United States of America

When I was drafted into the United States Army in 1951 the Korean
War was taking a heavy toll of American lives.

Before the war ended in 1953, more than 33,000 young Americans had
been killed and another 107,000 were seriously wounded.

During my 16 weeks of basic training at Fort Belvoir, Virginia (8
weeks of infantry training and 8 weeks of combat engineer training), I watched
as the Army started to eliminate basic elements from training for Army companies
that were behind my company.

For example: Bayonet and hand-to-hand combat training was
eliminated and yet everyone knew bayonet attacks and hand-to-hand battles were
going on all over Korea.

As part of the engineer training, the Army did away with bridge
building, road building and airport building which were a very important part of
what a combat engineer does in a theater of war.

Also, the Army eliminated physical and mental requirements for
draftees and so the new recruits were many times grossly overweight and many of
them had severe mental problems.

Why do I mention all of this?

If you have been following the upcoming election as close as I do,
you would know Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are taking nothing off the table
including military action against Iran, Syria and possibly even North Korea.

Both Romney and Ryan have surrounded themselves with "hawks" from
the Bush/Cheney administration to run their foreign policy if they are elected.
All of these foreign policy "experts" are itching to start another war and even
expand the war in Afghanistan.

Obama, on the other hand, has been criticized for dealing with
these foreign governments by using diplomacy and sanctions instead of boots on
the ground.

As many of you know, I have been writing a blog about the wars in
the Middle East and everything I have read and printed has to do with how our
military is spread to the breaking point and that is why some soldiers are on
their fourth and fifth tour to Afghanistan. In short, we don't have enough
people joining the all volunteer military and we have to keep sending the same
troops back to Afghanistan.

The stress on our ground forces is seen by the number of cases of
PTSD that is rising and a suicide rate that has spiked to the point where one
out of every six returning GIs take their own lives.

The bottom line is we cannot get into another war without
re-instating the military draft. That means that if you have young children or
grandchildren, boys and girls, who will be military age soon then under a
Romney/Ryan administration they would more than likely be drafted for a minimum
of two years of active duty service in the military.

The most dreaded word you could see on your orders after completing
basic training in 1951 was: FECOM. What that meant is you were assigned to
the Far East Command which meant you were being shipped to Korea.

I hope you and everyone takes this upcoming election very seriously
because if you vote for Romney and Ryan you can expect more wars to breakout and
with more wars will come a need for more troops and that is when they will have
to re-instate the military draft.